Where are the protests at Nigeria’s slaughter?

While the West obsesses about its distant past, Christians living in Africa are under serious threat

In his letter to the Corinthians, St Paul compares the church to the human body: when one part of it hurts, the whole person hurts. Ergo, it’s beholden on Christians to kick up an almighty stink about what’s happening in Nigeria.

Muslim herders are running what looks suspiciously like a campaign of ethnic cleansing against Christian farmers: thousands of Nigerians are reported dead, with around 300,000 displaced. A new report by British MPS includes harrowing accounts of murder and rape. “They were trained terrorists with guns,” a survivor says of the people who invaded their village. “They killed those who couldn’t run – the aged, the children and the blind. A pastor was their first casualty. They surrounded him. They killed him and then they rejoiced, shouting ‘Allahu Akbar.’”

There has been retaliatory violence against Muslims, but the herders are remarkably well defended for cattlegrazers. A general in Adamawa claimed that his soldiers had to use rocket-propelled grenades to beat the herders back.

One of the principal causes of the conflict is climate change. Rising temperatures have transformed pastoral land into desert, forcing the herders to abandon their traditional regions and occupy Christian farmland instead. A leap in the price of cattle has actually given the herders added purchasing power at the same time as the cost of guns has fallen, thanks both to the domestic arms industry and the flow of weapons from Libya – a country that the West helped destroy. Given that the West is big on collective guilt at the moment – and given that this story involves the twin evils of climate change and Western foreign policy – here is something concrete to get angry about. And yet, there is hardly a tweet.

For once, I don’t entirely blame our politicians, who have become far more vocal on religious freedom than they used to be. Take Donald Trump: his recent photo opportunity at a shrine of John Paul II was denounced by a Catholic bishop as deeply inappropriate – coming so soon after the death of George Floyd – and yet, said the White House, the whole point of the trip was to celebrate the signing of an executive order against international religious discrimination, so it’s a pity that Trump’s good intentions didn’t get the accurate coverage they deserved.

But the key problem probably isn’t a lack of political or media attention but a dearth of popular interest. When Western Christians raise what is going on in Africa, Iraq or China, they do so in the naive assumption that their fellow countrymen share St Paul’s ethic, that every Westerner feels an instinctive loyalty to Christians persecuted overseas. I fear they do not. Or at least, it’s not obvious from the wider culture. Where are the movies, the songs, the marches or even a self-promoting celebrity post on Instagram? Couldn’t some Z-lister with a book to flog at least bake a cake for Nigeria?

“Uh, like, sorry – no?” Some of us are far too busy fussing about what happened in the West’s past to worry about what’s happening in Africa today. We seem more concerned with the statues of dead imperialists than we are with living Africans.

I note that America’s war on

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images has extended to tearing down statues of Junípero Serra, the 18th-century priest who evangelised on the West coast and was canonised by Pope Francis only five years ago. This is how many young people now see Christianity – colonial and oppressive – and in the intersectional hierarchy, those who were once first must now come last, hence Christians probably matter less than any religious group on the planet.

The protests are fuelled by legitimate anger at brutality and racism, but also lockdown boredom and revenge for Trump – plus they betray the long-term effects of secularisation. The old still cling to their religion, conservatives doubly so, but the young and the liberal have abandoned faith in their droves, creating a vacuum that has to be filled by something. We all have a need to believe. Without organised religion, politics fills the vacuum. George Floyd is the movement’s martyr and the faithful take a knee as if in genuflection. We must confess our transgressions; sinners are named and shamed. However, one quality precious to the old religion is hard to find in the new. The valley of mercy is now a desert.

Cardinal Francis George once said of modern life: “Everything is permitted” but “practically nothing is forgiven”, and he was right. We are generally told we can do whatever we wish and believe whatever we want, but the moment we cross a line we might not even know exists, we discover there is no path back, only shame and exile. In this ugly “cancel culture”, the only people who can last five minutes are those who feel no shame, which explains the appeal of Mr Trump to Right-wing Christians. He, almost alone, seems willing to defend what they believe without a shred of embarrassment.

But the real, tragic test of Christianity’s decline won’t be shattered statues; it will be the collapse of forgiveness. God, said Cardinal George, permits rather less yet “everything can be forgiven”. That quality of mercy is the bedrock of our civilisation, and we are in danger of losing it.